Dish Considering T-Mobile Buy?

Posted by
Sam Churchill
on
December 20th, 2013

A merger between Dish and T-Mobile USA would easily win regulatory approval, unlike a Sprint purchase of T-Mobile, says JP Morgan. A Sprint/T-Mobile merger would leave three major mobile carriers in the U.S., while a Dish/T-Mobile merger would leave four.

The FCC today also gave Dish Network more time to build its 2.1 GHz network. The new waiver gives Dish eight years instead of seven to use some of its spectrum. In return, Dish plans to bid a minimum of $1.56 billion in the upcoming auction of so-called H block frequencies, scheduled for January.

Dish made a $25B bid for Sprint earlier this year. Sprint, now 80% owned by Japan’s SoftBank, also prevailed over Dish in a takeover battle for Clearwire that ended in June.

Besides 40 MHz in the 2.1 GHz band, Dish owns a slot of 700 MHz airwaves and is one of the 34 contenders to bid for the Jan 2014 auction of PCS H Block. Furthermore, DISH also offered a bid to acquire 40 MHz of wireless spectrum held by LightSquared, which is currently bankrupt. That’s a lot of spectrum.

Dish has the spectrum – but no where to put it. Traditional carriers may be wary of a sharing their antennas with someone who could undercut them. Conceivably, T-Mobile’s AWS network infrastructure could host Dish’s MSS frequencies.